In his latest book, “Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History,” Thomas Albert Howard presents three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment: passive, combative, and eliminationist. Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone and says Westerners do not fully grasp this because they often mistake passive secularism for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges when you adopt a broader global vision.

On today’s episode, John Pinheiro, Acton’s director of research, talks to Howard about secularism, what about it we often misunderstand, and his book.

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Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History | Yale University Press

Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard | Valparaiso University

The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression